Context-adaptive variable-length coding

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Context-adaptive variable-length coding (CAVLC) is a form of entropy coding used in H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video encoding. It is an inherently lossless compression technique, like almost all entropy-coders. In H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, it is used to encode residual, zig-zag order, blocks of transform coefficients. It is an alternative to Context-based adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC), a more space-efficient entropy encoding scheme which requires considerably more processing to decode. CAVLC is supported in all H.264 profiles, unlike CABAC which is not supported in Baseline and Extended profiles.